Snow in May

Kseniya Melnik's debut collection is a powerful achievement. Its center of gravity is the remote, eastern Siberian outpost of Magadan, a subarctic gateway to hell through which prisoners headed for Stalin's gulags once passed. Composed of nine (at times rather subtly) linked stories spanning generations and the second half of the 20th century, the book achieves real heft when considered in toto. Melnik, who grew up in Magadan before moving as a teenager to Alaska, writes evocatively of the textures, smells and bone-chilling temperatures of this exotic land in prose that is burnished and precise.

In the standout "Love, Italian Style, or in Line for Bananas," she conjures "austere neoclassical buildings the color of cucumber flesh, omelet batter, sour-creamed borsch," and a woman standing in line with "cheekbones (that) were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soupspoons." In that story, set in the mid-1970s, a wife and mother travel to Moscow to stock up on supplies of clothes and food that are difficult to come by back home. A member of a traveling Italian soccer team on board her flight boldly propositions her. She spends the length of her trip standing in soul-crushing lines on behalf of her family and mulling over the possibility of a fleeting tryst.

In the deeply disturbing "Rumba," set in the aftermath of communism, a middle-aged dance instructor takes a talented and troubled girl in the "six to eleven" age group under his wing. "Up close she was snub-nosed and thin-lipped," Melnik writes. "Her eyes, big chocolate cherries. Her fake eyelashes had half come off, and strands of gelled black hair, released from her bun, stuck out around her head in question marks." Such attention to detail is capable of transforming the monstrous and monotonous alike into things of beauty.

An Untamed State

By Roxane Gay

(Grove/Black Cat; 370 pages; $16 paperback)

The story of a wealthy first-generation Haitian American woman who is kidnapped outside the gates of her family's Port-au-Prince mansion, Roxane Gay's novel "An Untamed State" tackles complicated issues of race, class, gender, identity and inequality with remarkable clarity and insight.

On the way to the beach with her white Nebraskan husband, Michael, and their infant son, Christophe, Mireille's car is surrounded by three black SUVs. "(A) gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones" savagely beat the husband and wife in the street, in front of their baby and a throng of impassive neighbors and onlookers.

Mireille is swiftly abducted and held hostage for 13 days, during which time she is subjected to torture and sexual atrocities while her construction-magnate father dithers over the million-dollar ransom. He justifies such inaction as utilitarianism: Port-au-Prince is the kidnapping capital of the world, and paying is an invitation to start the process all over again: "I had to think about your mother, your sister, my sisters, the rest of our family," he explains.

Even after she is freed and the ordeal is ostensibly behind her, the mental and physical fallout threaten to undo Mireille. Yet her story, told mostly in the first person and through flashback, is related with enough emotional distance as to allow real generosity. Was it wrong that no witnesses attempted to intervene?

"There's no room for such distinctions," Mireille decides, "in a country where too many people have to claw for what they need and still have nothing to hold." The psychological acuity with which Gay represents even the most unspeakable suffering make for a gripping and thoroughly harrowing read.

Race Horse Men

How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack

By Katherine C. Mooney

Katherine Mooney's enthralling account of an all-but-forgotten population of elite slaves in the American South reads like a novel. "Race Horse Men" is both the story of 19th century thoroughbred racing - "America's first mass-audience sport" - and a detailed portrait of the expert equestrian slaves and free black horsemen upon whose competence in the stables wealthy white "turfmen" depended.

Passed down from the English aristocracy, thoroughbred racing was an institution that powerful Southern planters "used to define themselves and make sense of their world," writes Mooney. Thus, it was at the racetrack that they "exhibited in a particularly revealing light how continuously and deeply they believed in the necessity of hierarchy."

So devoted were these men to this pursuit that the most capable slaves could attain prominence, freedom and wealth at the track. Before Willie Jones died, he freed his slave, Austin Curtis, and left him $200 and the use of his estate until his son came of age. When Curtis died in 1808, he left 300 acres to his family and had bought the freedom of nine of his 11 children.

By the turn of the 20th century, white turfmen came to fear such men living outside the codes of racial subordination and began systematically forcing them from the sport. "Jim Crow had destroyed the extensive professional networks that had long given black men security and made them markers of hope and racial pride." Yet Mooney makes a strong case for why these forgotten histories continue to illuminate systems of inequality to this day.